Staging International Feminisms, borne of an IFTR working group, aims to bring ‘differently located feminisms and theatre cultures together – beside, alongside and in critical dialogue with each other, but not at the expense of each other’ (p. 4). Plurality and difference – informed, circumscribed and galvanized by specific geographies and material exigencies – serve as linking principles. Although the essays, manifestos and critical analyses resonate with each other, they also productively collide. The editors celebrate the successes of feminist scholarship, but they equally provoke discussion about its shortcomings. At the close of the anthology, one is astonished at how feminist critique has intervened in – and continues to challenge and resist – national, economic and cultural practices of gendered oppression and elision. Simultaneously, the reader is keenly aware of an urgent international need to sustain, as well as reinvigorate and complicate, dialogue around the meaning, efficacy and potential of feminism(s).

Part One, ‘Cartographies’, interrogates the discourse of globalization, its occlusions of gendered labour and migration and its drive for cultural homogenization. The contributions thrust the global and the local into critical dialogue; particularly striking are the contributions from Karen Shimakawa and Sue Ellen Case, both of whom address tourism. Shimakawa scrutinizes the gendered psychological disorientation of New York City ‘Soundwalks’, in which a voice-recording of an ‘authentic local’ guides visitors through the ‘real’ Chinatown and Hasidic Williamsburg. Case analyses how queer tourism, itself a global industry, has inspired local, subversive resistance to oppressive gender regimes. Part Two, ‘Interventions’, focuses on the conditions of individual performances in specific countries and further destabilizes, throughout its array of essays, any homogenized conception of feminism, while also exposing Western assumptions about what constitutes gender-aware practice. In Part Three, ‘Manifestos’, practitioners and scholars – Isabel Juarez Espinosa, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Jill Dolan and others – address both the actualities and the possibilities of gender-based activism and performance from their uniquely located points of view.

While the anthology focuses on feminism(s) around the globe, Aston and Harris's monograph addresses the multiplicity of feminist practices in a single locale, the UK, based on the practioner-led workshop series Women's Writing for Performance. Aston and Harris again place gender-aware practices beside one another in complement and contradiction, but they are equally invested in critiquing established relationships between theory and practice. Through the curation, realization and documentation of the workshops, they evaluate how theory has come to overshadow practice and challenge themselves to ‘get back to professional practice on its own terms’ (p. 7). Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Bobby Baker, and Leslie Hill and Helen Paris lead workshops on deconstructionist and devised work, performance art and solo work – the foundations of political feminist theatre and performance. The book presents a valuable archive by addressing each artist's developmental journey and pedagogical approaches to teaching feminist ways of making work. Equally compelling are the chapters that address the feminist potential of seemingly less radical performance practices, such as the activist power of radio broadcasting (Sarah Daniels and Sally Avens), and Vayu Naidu attests to the interventionist ability of storytelling. These two books present a rich collection of work from which to ignite critical discussion about the present and future of feminism. Each also challenges the reader to assess how, as Aston writes in Staging International Feminisms, we labour ‘for and with each other’ (p. 93) despite, or because of, differences in circumstances, theories and practices.